Free A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman

pushed into my forehead. After a week of this, on an afternoon when the air was full of ozone from brewing thunderstorms and I felt too jittery to sit at the window, I went out looking for my father.
    It was the first time I’d gone into the subway since the transit cop brought me out of it, and the smell going down the steps—dead mice, urine, the sweetish scent of electricity—almost knocked me flat, made me grab for the railings to keep myself from crumpling to the ground like a drunk. I had to take one hand off the sticky railings and press my father’s messages against my chest, remind myself they were there, to make myself walk to the bottom of the steps.
    When the hot wind from the oncoming train blew into my face, and the brakes began screaming, metal on metal, I replayed the story of what had happened to my father after he’d arced off the platform—making myself see it clear inside my head—his incredible story of escape and rescue.
    I came out onto Times Square, stood beneath the billboard advertising Camel cigarettes, the smoking man made into a soldier for the war. As his clouds of artificial smoke drifted over me, I studied the faces of the men rushing past, faces that snapped into focus, as if I were turning the pages of a book of photographs. I imagined my father in a disguise, a belted overcoat like a movie detective, a hat pulled low on his forehead, although the temperature that day must have been in the nineties.
    After an hour or so, I walked down 43rd Street to Paradise Photo. I had decided that this was where my father came to develop the photographs he took of the people he suspected of being Nazi spies or saboteurs, that each night, he removed the key from behind the loose brick and went through the door with the sign that said
Knock or die
.
    Later, when I returned to Dyckman Street, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with Aunt May hovering over her.
    “I told you he was safe,” Aunt May said.
    But my mother flew out of her chair and pressed her hands against my chest as if she was checking that I was solid, crushing my father’s messages.
    “You cannot ever leave this apartment,” she told me.
    “Lily,” Aunt May said, “he’s a boy. You have to let him out.”
    “Take this then.” My mother pressed a rosary into my hand. “Carry it with you always.”
    The rosary was exactly like the one that had been coiled up inside the empty coffin. The moment I was inside my bedroom, I dropped it like it could bite me.
    Later that night after Aunt May left, I walked down the hallway to my mother’s room, stood outside her door with my father’s messages in my hand, breathing in the smoke from her cigarette.
    I should tell her,
I was thinking, remembering the panicked feel of her hands moving over my chest. But my father had written only my name on the outside of those messages, and I believe there was a part of me that wanted this to be a secret between the two of us, to be something only we knew.
    I stood in the hallway breathing in cigarette smoke for a while, then I slid the papers inside my shirt and went back to my room.
    •   •   •
    The following Sunday, when I returned to Good Shepherd with my mother, we did not go to the later Mass with Aunt May as we generally did, and we did not sit in our usual place in the middle pew. Instead, my mother walked me to the very front of the church, close enough to see the pots of wilted marigolds on the altar, to sit with the Desperate Catholics.
    It was my mother who had given them the name. Whispering it into my ear one bright Sunday, as we watched them spring to their feet ahead of the rest of the congregation, as if Mass were a competition, drop to their knees as if struck down.
    The Desperate Catholics repeated each phrase of the Mass after Father Barry in loud voices, their Latin disturbing the calm blue light of church. They did not pray with their heads bowed, the way the rest of us did, but craned their necks upward to